August 1, 2023

SHORT STORY REX - July 2023

Vajra Chandrasekera, Sasha Brown, Max Barker, Margaret St Clair and more

1. “Theses on the Scientific Management of Goetic Labor”, Vajra Chandrasekera

Chandrasekera manages to pack a lot into a very short space (just under 1500 words): the friendship between our narrator and a fellow demon summoner by the name of Fuentes, the pure horror and crass ugliness of colonialism, and a twist about which Ill say no more

He’s got a new book that’s just out that I hope to get a hold of soon, and if you havent read his story “Peristalsis” from the inaugural issue of The Deadlands then seriously what are you waiting on

2. “Super Black”, Sasha Brown

Have you ever had a roommate who was just a little too intense, somehow? Maybe you yourself were the too-intense one? Either way you’ll probably enjoy this story from Sasha Brown.

It follows two guys who work at MIT, one in the computer science lab and the other in The Media Lab, and when the latter brings home a new toy (of sorts) from work the hijinks progress from wacky to unsettling.

Very economically written, with neat flashes of description, and a sort of Bert and Ernie vibe from the characters. Also, dildos figure prominently.

Curiously, its the second month in a row that X-R-A-Y prints a story I really enjoyed by a person named Sasha (okay, the first was ‘Sascha’ with a ‘c’ but still)

3. “The Invisible Magnetus Sphere Shields Us from The Dangerous Ionising Radiation of Space”, Max Barker

Propagule issue 3 came out this month and while I haven’t finished reading all of it I will say I especially dug this extravagantly-titled little gem.

In it, our narrator is both a small child wrapped up in admiration of his mother, “a Saturnian Queen on an interstellar quest for revenge […] soundtracked by […] Martian-like jazz or chaos-prog” and also subtly at the same time an astronaut orbiting mother Earth whilst high on peyote

Barker’s prose blurs memory and sanity and real and pretend together beautifully, I highly recommend it and look forward to more from him and more Propagule

4. “The Gardener”, Margaret St. Clair

Hat-tip to the lovely folks at Podside Picnic for hipping me to this Margaret St Clair banger, in which a shitty little tyrannical bureaucrat works himself up into an arboricidal rage.

As in many other stories of hers, St. Clair shows a knack here for meticulously setting forth a clueless and/or cretinous character and then allowing her readers the pleassure and/or shock of watching said character get their shit wrecked lol

This story is so much fun and throws in such sharp little curveballs POV-wise and the payoff goes so surprisingly hard that we have no choice but to stan an SF-mixed-with-proto-eco-horror queen

Not-a-short-story-collection-I-believe-it’s-referred-to-as-a-fix-up-actually: The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

Found a recent edition of this in the secondhand shop which prompted me to do another one of those re-reads that are almost first reads because of the time elapsed1

Gotta say I was kind of blindsided by the one with all the n-words in it, and the fatphobic one, but apart from that, it gives you that raw uncut Bradbury dope. For example, in the story that opens the book, “February 1999/2030: Ylla” (originally published as “I’ll Drink Not Wine” (MacLean’s, Jan. 1, 1950).

What struck me on this reading was just how blatantly the set-up of the story is an old New Yorker-style “two people in a failing marriage try and fail to fix things with a failed night out on the town” story, except instead of being clearly set in some sleeper suburb of NYC it’s disguised in the set dressing of a sci-fi story on Mars. (Instead of driving into the city for dinner and a show, Yll says to Ylla, “Let’s take the flame birds to town tonight to see an entertainment.”)

But absolutely none of that matters when the set dressing is this exquisite:

“Ylla laid herself back in the canopy and, at a word from her husband, the birds leaped, burning, toward the dark sky. The ribbons tautened, the canopy lifted. The sand slid whining under, the blue hills drifted by, drifted by, leaving their home behind, the raining pillars, the caged flowers, the singing books, the whispering floor creeks. She did not look at her husband. She heard him crying out to the birds as they rose higher, like ten thousand hot sparkles, so many red-yellow fireworks in the heavens, tugging the canopy like a flower petal, burning through the wind.

Like I said, the pure uncut Bradbury dope. So you heard it here first, folks, summer of 2023: a recognized classic by one of history’s most cherished and respected geniuses of speculative fiction is Good, imo

Not-a-story rec: You Wanna Kiss About It?, The Bulletproof Tiger

Do you like, ahem, ‘math rock’?

Not sure? Well, do you like songs composed in odd time signatures (5/4, 7/4, 13/4, although when you get right down to it its just mixing a bunch of 3’s and 2’s), with perhaps a little 4/4 thrown in as a treat? Do you prefer your instrumental music to have song titles that are all always and without exception some weird inside joke between the band members? Bonus question: how you feel about ‘tapping’ as a technique for playing the guitar?

If you responded in the affirmative to at least two of those three, then you owe it to yourself to listen to this album if you have not already had the pleasure of doing so:

Hear the album that rando Youtube commenters have described as “literally the best math rock ever” and also “the worst album cover ever”.

Hard to pick a standout track but you can’t wrong with “Franko Spanko’s Greatest Hit”, “An Awkward Moment with a Grilled Cheese Sandwich”, “Our Band Name Sucks” or “Christopher ‘Walken’ Reeve”